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| Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 10:17 AM EDT |
These seems to be confusion between the API Specification which should be
capable of being copyrighted, and the implementation of an API which requires
code and should be copyrighted by the author of the code.
Whether the Implementation is a derivative work of the Specification is one of
the questions.
The Judge has already ruled that the names cannot be copyrighted but left open
the question of arrangement and structure.
Is this referring to the Specification or to the Implementation?
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Rsteinmetz - IANAL therefore my opinions are illegal.
"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."
Randy Newman - The Title Theme from Monk
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| Authored by: hardmath on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 10:20 AM EDT |
Actually this is something Google explicitly agreed to, more
or less, that the jury doesn't have to consider the
originality requirement. It doesn't mean copyright protection
extends to the APIs "as a whole" or in specific part because
some things are not copyright protectable even when original.
Basically the Judge is going to have to rule on whether there
is anything protectable by Oracle in the 37 APIs that Google
copied from Harmony.
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Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense. -- John McCarthy (1927-2011)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 10:53 AM EDT |
So it's copyrightable, but once it was opened to public domain (Harmony) the
question boils down to what remains copyrightable and in what form are the
copyright itself subject to licensing fees? Think about what public domain
means.
At some point someone will have to decide how much "duplication" (for
lack of a better word) constitutes infringement on copyright. In music anything
less than a complete measure is not copyright enforceable.
Google wants actual implementation (code) of the API to interpreted as the
subject of copyright. ie all the notes in the measure that make up the
measure.
Oracle wants to copyright the API regardless of its implementation. The music
equivalent would be to copyright the bar, staff and treble-cliff separate from
the notes. It's the framework from which all music is denoted in it's standard
form that musicians understand (the language of music).
I think Oracle could have a chance to claim the API as their original work
protected by copyright if they had never released it to the public domain. They
did that to accelerate acceptance of their standards by the developer community
so much that Google accepted the standards. Now it's only fitting that Oracle
live with the consequences IMO.
And one last note (pun intended), the TCK licensing is something that
corporations agree to voluntarily; Oracle obviously tries to put pressure on
everyone to accept it since they hold patent and copyright paperwork on the
original Java *implementation*. Where corporations feel their implementation is
substantially similar they are more likely to comply.
Even though a certain member of the Android team may have felt a license was
needed, Google is completely within its right to not volunteer for the TCK
agreement. The issue then becomes, why did a member of that team believe
licensing was needed? Were his responsibilities in the team and his knowledge
of the minutia in licensing terms sufficient to definitively make such a call,
or was he merely speculating or asking for more specialized people to look at
the issue. Managements request for him to look at alternatives could very well
have been genuine, but it's not an admission they where prepared to infringe on
copyright, just that they wanted to scrub out more j's to separate/distance
their product from java and whatever arcane licensing issue may be associated.
IANAL[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: DieterWasDriving on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 05:30 PM EDT |
I'm a little surprised with this ruling. Not with the concepts, but with the
details of the wording.
Both agree that the API _specification_, the document itself, is original enough
to be copyrighted. Simplifying this to just "API" is misleading.
The second claim is that just by reading and understanding the document, your
future actions are bound by a license. That's like a cookbook claiming rights
to subsequently control where you may open a restaurant.
At least the second claim may be balanced by an explanation of the bounds of
copyright law. The wording of the first seems irredeemable.
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